Marie-Eve Beaulieu presents her new exhibition États de surfaces, a thoughtful follow-up to her previous project, Et si on recommençait? Retrospective 02-22. This time, the artist returns with a more traditional approach to painting.
États de surfaces features a series of paintings exploring the accumulation and transformation of different materials, and a return to a freer gestural approach to the act of painting. The artist plays with the limits of completeness, privileging the spontaneity of gesture over the search for illusions. Many of the paintings are based on photographic images, capturing jumbled detritus ranging from piles of recycled materials to remnants of natural or abandoned places.
In this new body of work, Marie-Eve is interested in surface states as strata through which the viewer gains access to the work. The surfaces chosen for the large formats (plaster, primed and raw canvas) offer subtle experiments in the depth of the spaces created, and have an impact on the choice of colors and application techniques. Rapid, gliding gestures evoking writing, jerky strokes on raw canvas, smears on the rough surface of plaster: the artist adapts to the various materials to find that state oscillating between the finished and the unfinished.
“I play with different surfaces, layers and depths. I try to capture a precarious state of the image, of floating, the moment when there is just enough information, or even almost too little. The moment when everything settles in the right place, without looking for illusions or excessive effects. I use a color palette reduced to colored grays: no blacks, no whites, everything contaminates each other, whether in high contrast or tone-on-tone. I play with negative spaces, the depth of planes and light breakthroughs.
Her work offers a variety of processes: we move from one point of view, one technique, one trial to another. Residues of dried paint stand next to chips of paint that seem to dissolve on the surface, in a play of alternation or a logic of inversion.
This body of work has been built up as a tangle of gestures and decisions that respond to each other and intertwine. Every gesture has a consequence, in the sense that each painting generates a part of the next. By transforming what is often perceived as residue or waste, Beaulieu not only questions matter, she questions our very existence in a world in constant transformation.
